


Don't Get Around Much Anymore

by orphan_account



Category: due South
Genre: Backstory, Ballroom Dancing, Depression, Divorce, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray doesn't have much reason to go anywhere or do anything, these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Get Around Much Anymore

**Author's Note:**

> "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" started life as an instrumental piece by Duke Ellington called "Never No Lament." A couple of years later, as the US got into World War II and people started being separated from each other by external events, Bob Russell added lyrics, a few of which are quoted in the story.

_Missed the Saturday dance…_

When Ray was a kid, ballroom dance lessons were Saturday afternoons. He fought tooth and nail against going, but his parents wanted him to “better himself.” Ray thought that he’d be better off pitching pennies on the curb or flipping playing cards into someone’s uncle’s fedora. That was bettering oneself. 

Going to dance lessons? Well, Ray tried to imagine that maybe Steve McQueen’s mom made him go to ballroom dance class. Ray had a great imagination, but picturing Steve McQueen as having an actual mom who baked brownies and made whatever the McQueen family did in lieu of pirogues…that was a little past his daydreaming expertise.

But then he met Stella at Saturday ballroom dance school and suddenly nothing could keep him away. They fit together so well, even from the start, when it should’ve been awkward and terrible and filled with anxieties about bodily odors. 

It wasn’t like that at all. It only got awkward and terrible and filled with anxieties about bodily odors when Ray pissed his pants during the bank robbery. Stella said it was clearly the genius act of a cornered hero. Ray never had the nerve to correct her. 

And that resulted in his having a dance partner for Saturday dance lessons, contests and just plain dates right up until 1997.

_Might have gone, but what for?_

In 1997 things fell apart. The center did not hold, like that guy said that time in the poem in high school. The center collapsed like the middle of a fifteen inch thin-crust.

Ray hated thin-crust. Chicago had done a lot both to and for him. And the city made up for the “to” category quite a bit simply by being the deep dish capital of the pizza world. Lately that was what counted as a whole lot of “for” in Ray’s book.

He ordered one of those bad boys every Saturday night, once he’d left the ritzy condo he and Stella had shared. His ex-mother-in-law had a friend in real estate and she helped him find a new place. One of his classmates from the academy helped him figure out how to make the new place fun and homey instead of sad and pathetic.

They actually did a good job. The problem was that Ray himself felt sad and pathetic instead of fun and homey. So he sat around and watched TV, and sometimes pushed one of the wheels on his bike where it hung on the wall. Sometimes he felt so ambitious and bold that he took the bike off the wall and rode out around town. 

Those were good days, when he felt like he was actually doing something.

Mostly, he just sat around and wondered if he should get a fedora. He already had a deck of playing cards. They'd been a Secret Santa gift from a civilian aide at his last district.

_It's awfully different without you…_

Some Saturdays, Ray tried going out. He went to organized dinner-dances because, as a single man, he was supposed to be hot stuff on the social commodities market. He ended up dancing with a lot of women older than his mom or the same age as his cousin's daughter. The daughter of Cousin Stashya, who was within two months of being exactly the same age as Ray himself. 

If Ray hadn’t been so lonely for romantic companionship, he would’ve enjoyed the whole thing a lot more. He had a good enough time, sure enough, but never met anyone age-appropriate to whom he could pitch woo or even trade cheesy pick-up lines with.

Sometimes he wondered about the internet. There were places where he could put up a picture, some details about himself, maybe get a chance to look at pictures of socially available ladies. 

He was pretty sure that, if he did that, he might as well quit the police department, buy a comic book store and really let himself go.

That idea was almost more appealing than thought of another Saturday night schlepping wrong-age-bracket single women around the Knights of Columbus hall while a DJ spun Frankie Valli platters. Always phrased exactly that way: “I’m gonna spin you a new platter!” the DJ would say excitedly. To Ray, the CDs the DJs used looked more like coasters than platters.

Nothing was like it used to be, these days.

_…don’t get around much anymore._

Eventually, Ray just gave up. Again. He would stay holed up in his apartment (fun! homey! hot and cold running Frankie Valli!) for entire weekends, letting Friday slip seamlessly into Saturday, getting overly invested in NCAA basketball because, from November through March he had a perfectly legitimate excuse for not going anywhere or doing anything. He had entire _conferences_ to follow! It was important! Maybe he was seeing the next Michael Jordan or Shaq if he just stared at the TV hard enough to _will_ the “student athletes” to greatness.

And if Ray could barely tell Villanova apart from Vanderbilt, couldn’t bring himself to care about the apparently evident and numerous reasons Stanford was so very, very much better than Cal…well, that was something he only admitted late Saturday nights, when, exhausted after a full day of watching television, he idly spun one of the wheels on his bike and wondered if he’d ever ride it again. Go to the park to play chess again. 

Care about life again. That kind of thing.

Maybe it would happen someday. Maybe someday someone would say, “Hey, Kowalski, get your skinny Polish ass over to the 2-7 and take on a pile of craziness so another cop who happens to look just like a mobster can go undercover, but we’re gonna pretend like you’re him, because…well, can’t you just roll with this, Kowalski?”

Ray would’ve objected to the sheer numbskulled stupidity of the whole plan, but that would’ve required more effort than simply hauling his skinny Polish ass over to the 2-7 where he had to pretend he didn’t want to bone his pretend sister. Which was admittedly a much better kind of pretense than pretending to care about life. 

And, hey, who knew? Maybe life as Vecchio at the 2-7 had other compensations. Ray had heard stories about some pretty creative policing Vecchio had done with some Mountie, who was currently on vacation up north but would soon be back in Chicago and expecting to hang out with the Chicago PD for reasons that made no fucking sense whatsoever.

No fucking sense whatsoever was as good a reason as any other. Ray was healthy and fairly young; he had a lot of Saturdays to get through and maybe having an actual Mountie as his ride-along would make them a little more interesting.

Yeah, Ray thought, because where there is life, no matter how dull, there is hope, no matter how small.

**Author's Note:**

> Poor Ray. Maybe one day he'll understand that it's actually _Cal_ that is better than _Stanford_.


End file.
